COULnN'T IT TO MYSBLF i

WAIiLV LAMB and the woiviesn of york cokrisctionaIj institution rElSTIIVIONIES FK01I OUK I IVI PK ISO NE E) SISTtlKS f

ii •

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USA $24.95 CANADA $38.95

Wliat I hope is that people reading this book will bear in mind that we are htunan beings first, inmates second.

—Bonnie Foreshaiv

In a stunning new work of insight and hope,

New York Times bestselling author Wally Lannb once again reveals his unmatched

talent for finding the humanity in the lost

and lonely and celebrates the transforming

power of the written word.

For the past several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prison- ers at York Correctional Institution. At first

mistrustful of Lamb, one another, and the

writing process, over time these students

let down their guard, picked up their pens,

and discovered their voices. In this unfor-

gettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were

imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their

own self-destructive impulses long before

they entered the criminal justice system.

Yet these are stories of hope, humor, and

triumph in the face of despair. Having used

writing as a tool to unlock their creativity

and begin the process of healing, these

amazing writers have left victimhood

behind.

In his powerful introduction, Lamb de- scribes the incredible journey of expression

and self-awareness the women took through their writings and shares how they chal-

lenged him as a teacher and as a fellow

author. In "Hair Chronicles," Tabatha Rowley

tells her life history through her past hair-

styles—outer signals to the world each time

she reinvented herself and eventually came

to prize her own self-worth. Brenda Medina

admits in "Hell, and How I Got Here" that she continued to rebel in prison until her

parents' abiding love made her realize that

her misbehavior was hurting them and

herself deeply. In "Faith. Power, and Pants,"

(continued on backflap) 0203

COULDN'T KISEP IT TO IWEYSESLF

llllllllllllllll

COULriN'T KEllESP IT TO IVIYSELP

VLTALLiY ImAJMLU AND THIS WOMEN OF YORK COKKECTIONAL INSTITUTION TESTIMONIES FROM OUR IMPRISONED SISTERS

tin

ReganBooks An Imprint of HiTperCoWxnsPubltiher

All contemporary photographs of the women by Richard Roselle. All childhood photo- graphs courtesy of the authors.

A continuation of the copyright page appears on page 352.

couldn't keep it to myself. Collection copyright © 2003 by Wally Lamb. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota-

tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins

Publishers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publish-

ers Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Kelly Hitt

Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Couldn't keep it to myself: testimonies from our imprisoned sisters/Wally Lamb

and the Women of York Correctional Institution, p. cm.

ISBN 0-06-053429-X

1. Prisoners' writings, American—Connecticut. 2. Women prisoners—Connecticut. I. Lamb, Wally. II. Women of York Correctional Institution.

PS548.C8 C68 2003

810.8'09287'086927—dc21

2002036869

03 04 05 06 07 WB/RRD 10 987654321

For Diane Bartholomew, who left behind a legacy of words

CONTENTS

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi NOTES TO THE READER ~ Wally Lamb

1 COULDN'T KEEP IT TO OURSELVES ~ Wally Lamb

19 THE TRUE FACE OF EARTH ~ Nancy Whiteley

53 ORBITING IZZY ~ Nancy Whiteley

65 THEFTS ~ Carolyn Ann Adams

95 HAIR CHRONICLES ~ Tabatha Rowley

113 THREE STEPS PAST THE MONKEYS ~ Nancy Birkla

143 HELL, AND HOW I GOT HERE ~ Brenda Medina

177 CHRISTMAS IN PRISON ~ Robin Cullen

185 FAITH, POWER, AND PANTS ~ Bonnie Foreshaw

211 PUZZLE PIECES ~ Barbara Parsons Lane

245 MOTHERLOVE ~ Michelle Jessamy

267 SNAPSHOTS OF MY EARLY LIFE ~ Diane Bartholomew

335 BAD GIRLS ~ Dale Griffith

351 SOURCES AND SUGGESTED READING

llliiliiiillllll

The editor and contributors wish to thank the following individuals for

their time, talents, and assistance in the birthing of this book: George

Allen, William Barber, Aaron Bremyer, Paul Brown, Angelica Canales,

Lynn Castelli, Debbie Cauley, Linda Chester, Bruce Cohen, Marge

Cohen, Evva Donn, Kassie Evashevski, James Fox, Dorthula Green,

Brenden Hitt, Kelly Hitt, Doris Janhsen, Leslie Johnson, Terese Karmel,

Ann Koletsky, Christine Lamb, Pam Lewis, Ethel Mantzaris, Kay Miller, Kenneth Norwick, Paul Olsewski, Pam Pfeifer, Carl Raymond, Warden Pam Richards, Rick Roselle, Barbara Sanders, Beth Neelman Silfin, Dan Taylor, Pedro Valentin, Robert Youdelman, Ellen Zahl, and Gale Zucker.

Special thanks to publisher Judith Regan, associate editor Aliza Fogel-

son, and literary agent Leigh Feldman, and to the administrative, custo-

dial, and educational staffs of York Correctional Institution.

I

NOTES TO THE HEADER

llllllllllllllll

ABOUT THE COVER The front cover art for Couldn't Keep It to Myself is an assemblage made by York School students who participated

in an extension course in art appreciation taught by Pedro Valentin

through Three Rivers Community College of Norw^ich, Connecticut.

ABOUT CONTENT When David Berkowitz, the infamous "Son of Sam" serial killer, signed a book deal to tell the story of his murderous

spree, there v^as public outcry. To prevent high-profile criminals from

profiting from heinous deeds, the New York legislature enacted the "Son of Sam" law in 1977. The statute allowed victims of a person con-

victed of a crime to access profits made from that crime. In a later case

involving a book by a well-known organized crime figure, "Sammy the

Bull" Gravano, the Son of Sam law was challenged and declared uncon-

stitutional because of its overly broad restriction of First Amendment

rights. A second Son of Sam statute, enacted in 1992, narrowed the scope of the earlier law. If an author made only incidental or indirect

reference to a crime he or she had committed, then profits from the writ-

ing could presumably fall outside of the "profits made from a crime"

definition. Following New York's lead, the U.S. government and some forty states, including Connecticut, passed their own versions of Son of Sam statutes.

Out of respect for Connecticut's Son of Sam law, the contributors to this anthology have not written directly about the crimes for which they

were convicted. References to these crimes are incidental or tangential

to the stories the writers have chosen to tell.

ABOUT EDITING While they were developing their works in progress, the contributors to this volume gathered and used critical responses

from their peers, workshop co-facilitator Dale Griffith, and me. Most

wrote numerous drafts and received written as well as verbal editorial

xii NOTES TO THE READER

feedback on each revision. There was, in addition, classroom instruction

about various aspects of craft: the use of past versus present tense in

v^riting memoir, how to recast memories as dramatic scenes with the help of fictional techniques, how to balance narrative with exposition, how to write successful segues. When the submission deadline arrived, I took off my teaching hat and put on my editor's cap. It was not a com- fortable fit.

"What is editing?" I finally asked my German publisher. Dr. Doris Janhsen of List-Verlag, midway through the editing of this collection.

"How much editorial intervention is too much? How little is too little? How do I balance the author's right to tell a story on her own terms with the reader's right to a smooth, logical, and interesting read?" Dr.

Janhsen said she edited prose for clarity, pace, and dramaturgy. I went

back to work on the manuscript, guided by those three principles. In the

end, each of the selections in this book dictated its own editorial needs. "Fat" writing was made more lean. Flat phrasing was enlivened. Para-

graphs and episodes were cut and pasted. Shorter, self-contained pieces

were seamed together when theme or motif invited the fusion. Conse-

quently, there is a range of editorial involvement, from minimal nip-

and-tuck to a level of activity approaching "as written with." Most fell

somewhere in the middle of the continuum. In all cases, the writers had

final approval over their edited works.

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Nine of the eleven contributors in this collection wrote their pieces while incarcerated at York Correc-

tional Institution, a maximum-security facility located on the Connecti-

cut shoreline in Niantic. The two exceptions are Dale Griffith ("Bad

Girls"), a State of Connecticut-certified teacher at York School and the

workshop's co-facilitator, and Nancy Birkla ("Three Steps Past the

Monkeys"), a Connecticut native and recovering addict who was

imprisoned in the Kentucky State Penitentiary for Women. Birkla is a

private writing student and my first cousin. The grandmother who appears prominently in her essay was my grandmother, too.

ABOUT COMMUNITY Founded in 1977, Interval House of Hartford, Connecticut, is the state's largest and most comprehensive service

provider to battered women and their children. Says a representative:

NOTES TO THE READER xiii

"Every single day, story after story, the determined advocates of Interval

House stand with abused women in their struggle for survival and jus- tice." The contributors of Couldn't Keep It to Myself hsLve made Inter-

val House an equal partner in the sharing of revenues from this

anthology.

—WL

I

COULION'T KISIQP IT TO OURSELVES

lliiiiiiiiii WA L LY LAMB

HE TOY DEPARTMENT AT THE DURABLE STORE SOLD

Ttwo blackboards. The modest two-by-three-foot model came with wall brackets and a three-piece starter box of

chalk. Its deluxe cousin was framed in wood, had legs and

p? feet, and came "loaded": a pair of erasers, a pointer, a

twelve-stick chalk set, and a bonus box of colored chalk. I was a third-

grader when I spotted that blackboard. Good-bye to Lincoln Logs and

Louisville Sluggers. From the age of eight, I wanted to teach.

My first students were my older sisters. As preteenagers, Gail and Vita were more interested in imitating the dance steps of the American

Bandstand "regulars" than in playing school, but a direct order from

our mother sent them trudging upstairs to my classroom. I'd prepared for their arrival: work sheets, white shirt and clip-on tie, alarm clock

hidden under my bed for the surprise fire drill. If my sisters had to play, then they would playact. Vita cast herself as hip-swiveling Cookie

Crane, as smoldering a third-grader as there ever was. Gail was Rippy

Van Snoot, the class incorrigible. I was launching into opening exercises

when Rippy reached past me, grabbed a blackboard eraser, and bounced

it off my forehead. Cookie shrieked with delight and lit an imaginary cigarette. I forget which reprobate flung my flash cards into the air and made the room rain arithmetic.

Fourteen years later I was a high school English teacher with my first actual students. Paula Plunkett and Seth Jinks were the two I remember

most vividly from my rookie year. Paula had pretty eyes and graceful penmanship, but she was encased in a fortress of fat. Sad and isolated,

she sat at a special table in back because she didn't fit the desks. She

never spoke; no one ever spoke to her. In my first-year-teacher naivete, I sought to draw Paula into the dynamic, thinking group work and class

discussion would save her. My plan failed miserably. Seth Jinks was in the twelfth-grade class I'd been assigned because I

2 WALLY LAMB

had no seniority. "The sweathogs," these kids dubbed themselves. I was

twenty-one, and so were three or four of my sweathogs. We honey- mooned for a couple of weeks. Then one morning I walked up the aisle

and tapped Seth Jinks on the shoulder. I needed to wake him up so I

could exchange the paperback he hadn't read for the new one he wasn't

going to read. "Seth, get your head off the desk," I said. "Here's the new

book." No response. I poked him. He looked up at me with little-boy- lost eyes. "Go fuck yourself," he said. The room went quiet. The

sweathogs, Seth, and I held our collective breath and waited for my response. And in that uneasy silence, and the days, and months, and de-

cades that followed, teaching became for me not just a job but a calling. I have found special meaning in working with hard nuts, tough cookies,

and hurtin' buckaroos—those children among us who are the walking wounded.

That said, I did not want to go to York Correctional Institution, Con-

necticut's maximum-security prison for women, on that warm August afternoon in 1999. I was keeping a promise I'd made to Marge Cohen,

the prison school librarian. Marge had called three months earlier, as I

was preparing for a twelve-city book tour in support of my second novel, I Know This Much Is True, Several suicides and suicide attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair at the prison. Marge had

explained; the school staff, groping to find help, was canvasing the com-

munity. They thought writing might prove useful to the women as a coping tool. Would I come and speak.̂ Because I'm frequently asked to

support good causes and have a hard time saying no, I keep an index

card taped to my phone—a scripted refusal that allows me to preserve family and writing time. That day, though, I couldn't find my card. I told Marge I'd visit when I got back from my book tour.

I would never have predicted an author's life for myself, but when I

was thirty, while on summer hiatus from teaching, I'd sat down and

written a short story on a whim. I liked doing it and wrote another. For

my third story, I fused a sarcastic voice to the visual memory of the mute, isolated Paula Plunkett. For years I had worried and wondered

about my former student. What had become of her? What had all that weight meant? Who had she been as a child? In the absence of actual knowledge, the life I invented around her remembered image became

COULDN'T KEEP IT TO OURSELVES 3

my first novel, She's Come Undone. It took me nine years to figure out the story of that bruised fictional soul whom I'd fathered and then grown to love and worry over. I loved and stewed over the flawed iden-

tical twins of my second novel, too—one of whom had a generous mea- sure of Seth Jinks's anger. What I did not see coming was that the world

would embrace these characters also. "Hello, Wally? Guess what?" The

caller on the other end of the phone line was Oprah Winfrey. She called

twice, once for each novel. The result: best-seller lists, limo rides, movie

deals, and foreign translations. Oprah's Book Club had taken my life by the seat of the pants and sent me on the road.

Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high,

trash the furniture with their bandmates, party with groupies. But

authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments,

we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room ser-

vice sandwiches, or ironing our clothes for the next reading, or watching

Judge Judy. Perhaps the most surreal moment during my book tour that summer occurred in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. While channel-

surfing, I came upon the quiz show Jeopardy! at the exact moment my name surfaced. "He wrote the novel She's Come Undone,'' Alex Trebek stated. In the long and torturous pause that followed, the three contes-

tants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their

thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the bed in room 417

of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a sheepish voice, "Who is Wally Lamb?" I'm a family man, a fiction writer, a teacher, and a guy who can't say

no without the index card. On that nervous first drive to York Correc- tional Institution, I sought to calm myself with music. I was fumbling

with CD cases and radio buttons when suddenly, over the airwaves, a piano pounded and the car shook with the vocal thunder of Newark,

New Jersey's Abyssinian Baptist Choir. The unfamiliar song so over- powered me that I pulled to the shoulder to listen. When it ended, I looked up at the highway sign in front of which I'd landed, correc-

tional FACILITY AREA, it Said. DO NOT STOP. The inexplicable emo- tional wallop of that moment fills me with wonder to this day.

To gain access to the women of York prison, you check in with the guard at the main gate, hang your laminated badge on your shirt

pocket, walk through a metal detector, then pass through a series of ten

doors, some of which slide open mysteriously after you stand and wait.

4 WALLY LAMB

You don't see who's flipping the switches, so it's an OrwelHan entrance.

At the prison school, I met my liaison. Dale Griffith, a warm and exu- berant English teacher. Dale and I arranged the chairs in a circle, a uni-

formed corrections officer bellowed orders from the corridor, and thirty

inmates entered the room.

Dressed identically in cranberry T-shirts and pocketless jeans, the

women came in all colors, shapes, sizes, and degrees of gender identifi- cation. Their attitudes ranged from hangdog to Queen of Sheba. Most

had shown up not to write but to check out "that guy who was on Oprah.'' I spoke. We tried some exercises. I asked if anyone had ques- tions about writing. Several hands shot into the air. "You met Oprah?"

"What's Oprah like?" "Oprah's cool, you know what I'm sayin'?" Uh,

was that a question?

At the end of my talk, one of the women stood, thanked me for com- ing, and pitched me a curveball. "You coming back?" she asked. Thirty pairs of wary eyes were upon me and my index card was back in my office. "Uh, well . . . okay," I said. "Write something and I'll see you in

two weeks. Any subject, two pages minimum. Your drafts will be your

tickets into the workshop."

At session two, fifteen of the thirty chairs were empty. Stacie wanted

praise, not feedback. Manhattan said she'd meant to be vague and non-

specific—that her business wasn't necessarily the reader's business. Ruth must have thought she was a guest on Oprah; she'd written only a para-

graph, but man oh man, did she want to talk. At age fifty-five Diane was the senior member of the group. For ninety minutes she hunched for-

ward, fists clenched on her desktop. Her suspicious eyes followed my every move. Diane had written under the pseudonym Natasha and had

exacted a promise before class that her work would never, ever be read

aloud. I predicted she'd be gone by session three.

But it was during session three that Diane Bartholomew ("Snapshots

of My Early Life") couldn't keep her writing to herself. Her shaky hand went up and she asked if she could share what she'd written. In a barely

audible voice, she read a disjointed, two-page summary of her horrific

life story: incest, savage abuse, spousal homicide, lawyerly indifference,

and, in prison, parallel battles against breast cancer and deep, dark

depression. When she stopped, there was silence, a communal intake of

breath. Then, applause—a single pair of hands at first, joined by another

COULDN'T KEEP IT TO OURSELVES 5

pair, and then by everyone. Bartholomew had sledgehammered the dam

of distrust, and the women's writing began to flow.

That was three years ago. I stopped counting sessions somewhere

around number fifty. Writers have come and gone: the narcotics-

addicted nurse who wrote a moving apologia to a deceased aunt whose

support had never wavered; the high school athlete who, a month after

graduation, brandished her Softball bat during a convenience store rob-

bery and wrote to figure out why; the young alcoholic mother who time-

traveled, penning a personal letter to one of the prison's original 1917

inmates, also an alcoholic. The workshop sessions have been a journey

rich with laughter, tears, heart-stopping leaps of faith, and miraculous

personal victories. There have been bumps in the road, too. Addicts are

elusive; they tend to begin promising drafts, take them to some interest-

ing midway point, then give up on themselves and stop coming. There

have been trust issues. Prison is not a place where trust is given easily,

and a writer who shares her work in progress risks exposure. That risk

taking must be honored. Only the writer should decide when, and if, her

work is ready for the eyes and ears of nongroup members—ready, in other words, to go public. If another group member breaches that trust,

she has to leave. Similarly, a few con artists and drama queens have been

handed their walking papers. A functional writing community cannot accommodate the needs of would-be superstars or instigators of the

guess-what-she-said-about-you variety. But those have been the excep-

tions. The brave writers whose work is represented in this volume have

acted in good faith, faced their demons, stayed the course, and revised

relentlessly. And in taking on the subject of themselves—making them- selves vulnerable to the unseen reader—they have exchanged powerless- ness for the power that comes with self-awareness.

"I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the

novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner

Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a

writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people

would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red

Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

Michelle Jessamy ("Motherlove") was fourteen when she became

pregnant by her teenage boyfriend. Despite the challenges, Jessamy's

6 WALLY LAMB

impending motherhood helped her get closer to her own emotionally distant mother. As she drafted her memory piece, that mother-daughter

epiphany emerged as the centerpiece. Then, mid-draft, Jessamy hit a

snag. She began writing a flashback to an earlier instance of sexual

abuse—a hallway molestation by a friend of the family when she was eleven. The painful incident was integral to the story she needed to tell,

but disclosing her long-kept secret made Jessamy feel uncomfortable.

She stopped writing. But self-censorship felt uncomfortable, too. Jes-

samy had worked hard on her essay and wanted to see it through. The

solution? A change of genre. On paper, Jessamy became Mo'Shay Shambly, and the pronoun / became she. Mo'Shay had the same hazel

eyes as Michelle, the same experiences. But now Jessamy was writing autobiographical fiction. That little bit of distance unblocked her and

she finished her piece.

Brenda Medina ("Hell, and How I Got Here") was self-censoring like Michelle Jessamy, but for a very different reason. For months after she

joined our group, she labored on the same short essay about the death

of her uncle Carlos—draft after draft after draft. One day I suggested to Medina that, God bless him, I didn't think I had the strength to attend

to poor Uncle Carlos's death one more time. "There's something else I

want to write about, but I can't," she told me. That "something" was

what had landed her in prison ten years earlier at age seventeen: her

affiliation with a violent street gang.

York Correctional Institution is vigilant in its efforts to eliminate

gang influence within the compound. Incarcerated gang members who choose to uphold their allegiance to "the family" pay a steep price in the

form of punitive segregation, loss of privileges, and loss of the "good

time" that can shorten their stay on the inside. A self-described punk when she arrived at York, Brenda Medina had traveled a long and diffi-

cult road as an inmate, freeing herself from the psychological grip of her

"family" and undertaking the rigorous step-by-step process by which an

inmate repudiates her gang affiliation and begins rehabilitation in

earnest. Even mentioning the name of a gang can cast suspicion that the

inmate has reneged on her disaffiliation. Medina's very real fear was

that, if she wrote about her past life, her work might be seized, taken

out of context, and misconstrued as gang-friendly. If that happened, she

could lose much of what she had worked so hard to achieve. My collab-

I

COULDN'T KEEP IT TO OURSELVES 7

orator, Dale Griffith, dealt with the problem directly. She sought and

received permission from prison officials for Medina to take up her gang

experience as subject matter. With that hurdle cleared, the writer was on

her way to a personal essay that, far from glorifying gangs, depicts their

insidious hold on young people's lives and the cancerous destruction of

their futures.

In her much-loved book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions

on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott observes: "We write to expose the

unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go

through, you must." The writer's job, Lamott instructs, is "to turn the

unspeakable into words—not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues." Bonnie Foreshaw ("Faith, Power, and Pants") is a

woman of stately bearing, strong faith, and rhythm-and-blues diction, the latter a reflection of her Jamaican birth and South Florida upbring-

ing. In Foreshaw's vernacular, her cousin is "my old cous' " and her

problems are "botherations." She does not converse with friends; she

"conversates." One day a while back, Foreshaw entered the workshop

looking weary. "How you feeling today. Miss Bonnie?" I asked. "I'm feeling botheration and sufferation inside this place," she replied.

Another day I rushed to the prison from a speaking engagement. I'm

usually in jeans but that afternoon I was wearing jacket, tie, and dress

pants that had fit me better before I'd lost some weight. "How's the writing going, Bonnie?" I asked. Ignoring the question, she gave me a frowning once-over instead. "Those your pants?" she wanted to know.

The problem was this: Foreshaw's speech was colorful and cut-to-the-

chase direct, but her writing "voice" was ponderous and deadly dull

—

the result, I suspect, of her having tried too hard to please grade school

teachers more interested in grammatical correctness than in voice. In an

early draft, Foreshaw wrote of a disciplinary measure taken against her:

"There I was, already in prison. Yet, I was being persecuted even further

into the bowels of hell. However, I was willing and able to endure what-

ever punishment was going to be inflicted on me because of the grace of God's spiritual influence, guidance, and protection. I would make it

through this ordeal."

"Bonnie!" we'd advise her during workshop discussions. "Stop

preaching and conversateV When she did, Foreshaw's writing came alive. A writer's voice, says the author and teacher Donald Murray, is

8 WALLY LAMB

forged from family background, ethnic heritage, childhood neighbor-

hood, present neighborhood, and the writer's roles in life. "And ironi-

cally," Murray says, "the more personal, the more individual you

become, the more universally you w^ill be read." The fiction writer San-

dra Cisneros says she tries to write in the voice she would use with a

friend sitting across her kitchen table while she's wearing her pajamas.

Her stories are read the world over.

Invoking one's natural voice on paper is easier for some writers than

for others. Robin Cullen ("Christmas in Prison") is a wry ironist in per-

son and on paper. Nancy Whiteley ("Orbiting Izzy," "The True Face of

Earth") deports herself with a world-weary toughness and a little girl's

vulnerability. Her writing voice captures those qualities exactly. Con-

versely, Brenda Medina, who comes from a large Latino family and is bilingual, had to be coaxed into introducing a little Spanish "music"

into her prose. Bonnie Foreshaw had to let us know she came from

South Florida and had not sprung whole from the pages of the Old Tes-

tament. Nancy Birkla ("Three Steps Past the Monkeys") credits her

twelve-step recovery with saving her life, but her writing soared when

she stoppe